Ha! I have seen more things than I’ve not seen in this Ghana, in this place Accra. I’ve seen rats chase lions. I’ve seen the sun at midnight. I’ve seen empty coffins fall out of the sky. I was here the year the Volta turned orange, but I’d never seen a train coffin until Ashong decided to die. Ha! Yes. Ashong is such a rich and powerful man, himself decided when he was ready to go. God had little to do with it.

Now when I die, a Volkswagen is enough for me. Been in the world seventy-three years, all I own fits into a suitcase-a big suitcase, hear me, but a suitcase. I’ll be wearing my only suit that I bought in France-that bad time in France chasing after that ex wife of mine. I got a hat the wind and rain shaped to look like a bundle a woman carries on her head, two pick axes from my days in the mines, a paper sack of my mot’dears’s glass beads and a signed photograph of the Queen that my last employer gived me instead of all my salary. My Brother Ashong owns-owned a farm and two wives.

“Elijah, you are a mole on the planet’s ass. I am the fists,” Ashong said to me when we were young roosters.

Ha! The fists are clenched and stilled, but the ass is wobbling on. The witchdoctor in that house there with the ox bones across the door said I got twenty more. Ha! A year for each British Pound I gived him. A year before Ashong died, he engaged two loony coffin builders in a contest to see who could build him the most elaborate box to carry his bones to heaven.

I took a big book atlas to his sick bed. I pointed to a speck in the map of the United States Texas. I told Ashong, “Heaven Texas is where you are going ol’ boy.” I had no expectation to be in his will. I am a mole. Ha!

Come boy, let’s get out of this rain. You had to come out and talk to us during rainy season. Ha! This wind makes the rain sharp as razor blades… Who sent you? Newsweek? I don’t like slick page magazine. Does not clean the ass good… Ha! Yes, yes, I’m sure it’s good to read… Where was I?

Yes you want the story of the coffin builders. Well put your shiny watch back up your sleeve. Remember what the witchdoctor told me. So Ashong put out a notice that he was putting up a contest for the best coffin makers to build the finest coffin for his departure. Ha! Wise men saw right through that. The loser would have spent thousands of Cedi and Pounds for a wasted effort. The winner? Ha! Try to collect from a dead man-which is what Dede Nunu came around here yesterday for. You took his picture? His head is too big for any camera. Ha!